Refollow

Version 1.0 Launched!

(Actually now version 1.0.2 after a couple quick bug fix releases last night…) We’ve received so many great feature suggestions from users since our beta launch a few months ago, and this release incorporates some of our favorites:

With/Without Picture filters

If you can’t come up with a picture for Twitter, the odds are you wont come up with much content either.. These filters let you track down (or weed out) those faceless users!

Tweeted in the last X days filters

Unless you are Guy Kawasaki, you only have a precious amount of people you can follow. Why waste these follows on inactive users? These filters let you group users by their last tweet activity.

Search for/Exclude terms filters

These are multi-purpose, powerful filters for narrowing down the users in your view. These search through the loaded users’ names, bios, tags, and last tweets. The “Search for” only displays matches, while the “Exclude terms” filters out the matches. You can type in specific text to search for, or if you leave the “(Any value)” in the text field, the search will make sure there is at least *something* in that field. Some useful examples:

• Search for [Rob] in [Name] - Show only users with a “Rob” somewhere in their name.
• Exclude terms [Expert] in [Bio] - Filter out all self-proclaimed experts.
• Search for [(Any value)] in [Bio] - Show only users with a Bio
• Exclude terms [(Any value)] in [Last Tweet] - Show only users who have never Tweeted
• Search for [Twitter] in [All] - Find “Twitter” in any field we can and only show those users.

Hopefully you get the point..

More info on mouse-over popups

We’ve packed the relationship icon, username, display name, last tweet, bio, location, website, crowd tags (more below), and number of followers, friends, tweets, and comments (more below on that, too) all into the popup you see when you move your mouse over a picture.

You’ll also notice a “Details” button - more on that in a minute. The username will link to the user’s Twitter page. Clicking “Friends” or “Followers” will automatically load those friends or followers (as if you typed that username into the “Show me” friends or followers of fields.)

User Details

By clicking the “Details” button on a user’s mouse-over popup, a “file” for that user will appear on the right. You can close this window with the X in the top right (or by clicking on “Details” button again). Some of the info here is redundant with the info on the popup, but if you like to move your mouse around the screen while you read, then this is the place to do it!

You’ll also notice some additional new stuff in that window: My Tags, Crowd Tags, and Comments.

My Tags

“Tags” are simple categories you can attach to each Twitter user. For now, we’ve limited the tags you can choose from (with full anticipation that you will immediately start complaining about our choices!). Feel free to suggest others and we’ll add them, plus I’m sure we will finish thinking through how to support your own custom tags soon enough. Right now, your choices are:

• Products (Sells products)
• Services (Sells services)
• Funny (Makes me laugh)
• Smart (Makes me think)
• Useful (Useful content)
• Expert (Expert in area)
• Quotes (Great quotes)
• Links (Great links)
• Pics (Great pics)
• Spam (Spammer)

Tags are useful for your own purposes (try tagging some users then applying the filter “Search for [Funny] in [My Tags]”), but when aggregated from everyone on Refollow, they become very powerful (we call these “Crowd Tags”)

Crowd Tags

Each Twitter user can have at most 3 “Crowd Tags” associated with them. These are simply the 3 top tags that all other users have applied to them. Obviously it will take some time before we gather a critical mass of tags and this becomes useful. But once we get there, this feature will be fun!

Comments

Beyond tagging a user (which is anonymous by the way), sometimes it would be nice to know what one particular user thinks about another (in 140 characters or less of course). We are allowing each user to leave one (and only one) comment about each other user. You can always go change or delete that comment, but this is meant to be more of a “review” of a user than the conversation between users you would find on Twitter.  Cool concept - let’s see how this one plays out in practice!

By the way, if you don’t like a comment a user has left for you, click your picture next to the logout link, and you can delete it from there.

Show me Users who have @mentioned me

Finally, here’s our personal favorite feature of this release. This loads all users who have previously “mentioned” you in a tweet (that is, they referred to you with an @username). Each time you load more, we attempt to load 100 users that mentioned you. One warning though - this one is a little expensive in terms of API calls. We can only load “tweets” you are mentioned in (then extract the user from there), and that costs 1 API call per 20 tweets. So each load will cost 5 API calls, and will probably not really load 100 unique users (since one user may have mentioned you in multiple tweets).

But the value of this feature is worth burning through some API calls! For example, try loading 500 or so mentioning users (once the status bar says “loaded 0”, then you’ve loaded all of them). Then filter by “I’m not Following”. If there are any, then Select All and Follow (that’s good Twitter etiquette!). Then turn off your filters, Select All, then Lock. This will ensure that you never accidentally unfollow those most valuable users that tweet about you!

That’s it.

Hope you enjoy the new features, and definitely let us know what you think! You can always send us ideas, suggestions, complaints, etc. via email support@refollow.com, or via Twitter @refollow.